it's now dangerous to edit text in windows

It is legitimately dangerous to edit plain text in Windows now. Yes, you could be forgiven for thinking I'm completely making that up, but unfortunately I'm not.

Microsoft incredibly found a way to break Notepad so bad that one of the very recent 'updates' for it resulted in the software having a remote code execution vulnerability. That is INSANE.

I could understand (but not condone) if this happened with a web browser. But a text editor, and frickin' NOTEPAD of all things? Really? Yeah, really.

You might think okay, just use Notepad++ and then and all is well, right?

Wrong.

Notepad++, a software I used to swear by, had its updater compromised for six months.

Never in all my life have I ever seen anything like this happen on any operating system in the history of personal computers for text editor software.

Again, I really have to drive home the point that this crap happened with text editors, meaning not document editors. Decades ago, macro viruses used to happen to Microsoft Word, and that goes all the way back to 1995. But Word is a fully featured documented editor. Again, I'm talking about text editors.

I dodged this disaster just by good timing

I switched my secondary computer from Win11 to Win10 IoT LTSC recently, and did put Notepad++ on it.

The timing of when I did that was amazing, because I had installed Notepad++ a day after v8.9.1 was released after all the security stuff was taken care of.

I've since uninstalled Notepad++ and won't go back. The only text editor on my Win10 now is notepad.exe, as in the old one that never had a problem before Microsoft 'updated' it...

...although I may consider Kate, since that's my go-to text editor in Linux, and a Windows version does exist for it. I'm very used to Kate at this point.

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Published 2026 Feb 12